Music Commons^™

Taruskin’S Dichotomies: Beyond Text And Act, Alon Schab

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s brilliant rhetoric sometimes led him to overly categorical generalizations. One notable example is his four-stage “genealogy of musical morals,” summarizing the history of music’s objectification as “art” through literacy, printing, the birth of transcendent and autonomous art, and recording. Similarly, Taruskin’s subtle bias against the British early music scene was often camouflaged under various generalized dichotomies such as “straight-style versus crooked-style.”

Taruskin’s views, initially seen in CD reviews and newspaper columns, gained enduring influence through their repackaging in Text and Act. This work also impacted John Butt’s Playing with History, where Taruskin played a key role in summarizing …

Richard Taruskin: In Memoriam, Klára Móricz

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

What was it like to be a student of Richard Taruskin? What was the most important lesson his students learned from him? In her short memorial essay, the present author considers the imperative of intellectual independence—freedom from methods, schools, political or scholarly agendas—the most lasting lesson she learned from Taruskin.

Richard Taruskin And The Early Music Movement, Uri Golomb

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s writings on the Early Music Movement had a pivotal influence on debates surrounding the concept of historical authenticity in musical performance. Taruskin championed the thesis that historically-informed performance (HIP) is only tenuously connected to actual past practices, that “a specious veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around” (as Taruskin wrote in a 1988 essay, reprinted in his seminal collection Text and Act). In arguing his case, he correctly diagnosed the practices and motivations of a major group of performers within the Early …

Richard Taruskin And The Art Of Judging Each Other, Michael Beckerman

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Combining personal reminiscence and reflections on a professional life as an academic, this essay deals with the challenges of maintaining personal friendships while judging each other's work with integrity and acuity. It is in the nature of our business that we are evaluated by our most brilliant and successful colleagues. In this case, because of Richard Taruskin’s honesty and his unsparing commitment to certain intellectual standards, the challenge was magnified.

Farewell To A Beloved Buddy, David Josephson

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

“You never know when it’s the last time.” For sixty years, from a chance meeting when we were undergraduates at Columbia until his last days, the incomparable Richard Taruskin gave me the great gift of his friendship. I never knew why, still don’t, but I reveled in every moment we shared. After I decamped for Brown ten years later, and he eventually for Berkeley, our meetings grew fewer and a cherished correspondence (those from its last months excerpted here) filled the gaps. COVID-19 put finis to our reunions. “The last time” would come and go with all too little warning, …

Richard Taruskin: Tender-Hearted Or Tough-Minded?, Rose Rosengard Subotnik

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Our tribute to Richard belongs with JFK’s tribute to Thomas Jefferson sitting alone at his dining room table. Relentless in argument with intellectual opponents, impatient with pieties past and present, gentle with colleagues in need, and unstintingly generous to students and junior colleagues, he encompassed so many poles in so many worlds that it will take us lifetimes to measure his stature and accomplishments. Recalling AMS/Oakland 1990, an exchange precipitated by my search for a copy of the Norton Critical Edition of the Symphonie Fantastique, Richard's take on Theory, and his paper "Shall We Change the Subject," I try to …

Introduction, Ronit Seter, Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin—the single most prominent and influential musicologist of the past half-century—died on July 1, 2022 at age 77. This Colloquy consists of extended versions of papers presented on July 2, 2023, at the annual meeting of the Israeli Musicological Society, and additional essays by scholars who knew Taruskin personally. The essays engage in critical reflections on his personality, ethics, teaching philosophy, methodologies, and massive and skillful literary output. Moreover, they illuminate developments in musicology over the past fifty years, from its positivistic roots and its focus on Western canonical works to challenges from ethnomusicological practices, feminist theory, and anti-racism/colonialism.

Front Matter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

The Music For “Victory At Sea”: Richard Rodgers, Robert Russell Bennett, And The Making Of A Tv Masterpiece, By George J. Ferencz. Rochester: University Of Rochester Press, 2023 [Review]., Elizabeth A. Wells

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Beethoven The European, Edited By Malcolm Miller And William Kinderman. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023 [Review]., Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Beethoven The European, Edited By Malcolm Miller And William Kinderman. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023 [Review, German]., Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Maestro, Directed By Bradley Cooper. 2023., Elizabeth A. Wells

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Orthography, Jeremy Gill

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The myth of Pope Gregory I taking melodic dictation from a magical singing bird is the imaginative starting point of Western musicʼs love-hate relationship with the music notation systems it later developed. This essay traces that development through Thomas Tallis and J. S. Bach to the dichotomous modern examples of Brian Ferneyhough and Arvo Pärt. In it, I suggest that Western musicʼs eventual development hinged upon that earliest desire to document and codify melodies, answering Gregoryʼs contemporary Isidore of Seville, who lamented that “unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down.”

Mozart’S Jewish Librettist: A Brief History Of A Poorly Kept Secret, Robert L. Marshall

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s three greatest Italian operas, was born a Jew, a fact rumored about during his lifetime but not definitively established until 1900. The treatment (or not) of Da Ponte’s Jewish origins as documented from his time to the present constitutes a history of concealment, rumor, discovery, denigration, and exploitation. Its nadir was reached during the Nazi period, its zenith most recently, as the poet, hitherto a secondary player in the Mozart biographies, has emerged as the colorful protagonist in substantial biographies of his own.

In Praise Of Simplicity: Marie Hinrichs’S Op. 1, Neun Gesänge, Stephen Rodgers

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

In a chapter from German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (1996), Jürgen Thym describes the historiography of the German Lied as “a hike through the high-peak area of a mountain landscape where the trail along the ridge leads from one glorious peak to the next.” Beneath the high peaks of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, he notes, are smaller peaks not reachable by trail. Thym clears paths through this unexplored landscape by surveying the Lieder of Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Franz Liszt, Robert Franz, Clara Schumann, and Peter Cornelius. My essay extends one of these paths, exploring the songs of …

Berlioz's Mysterious Amélie, Pascal Beyls, Peter Bloom

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

In September 1864, in a letter to his long-time confidante, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Berlioz mentioned the name of the woman with whom, as he had earlier confided to the Princess, he had conducted a brief but passionate affair: “her name was Amélie.” Until now, the Berlioz scholars have been unable properly to identify this mysterious person. From other letters and documents, including Ernest Legouvé’s Soixante ans de souvenirs, we have known the approximate dates of the beginning and ending of the relationship. But only now, on the basis of the birth and death certificates of the woman and …

Revolutionary Alchemy: Incantation And Collage As Magical Methods In Rock Of The Countercultural Era, Jay Keister

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Magic held a special fascination for the post-war counterculture, a movement that valued music and art as tools of the imagination to counter what Theodore Roszak called the “technocracy” in which science was to blame for cultural disenchantment in the West. At a time when countercultural rhetoric was bolstering a newfound faith in the power of music to generate social change, rock music began to be conceived by many musicians and perceived by audiences as a kind of magic. This article considers music by the Beatles, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and others to show how musicians …

William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes: "Why The Hell . . . Should Anyone Listen To This?!", R. Douglas Reed

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The article explores William Albright's Whistler (1834-1903): Three Nocturnes (1989) through historical context, musical analysis, performance practice, and the composer's essay on the relationship between his composition and Whistler's paintings. Commentary by composer Sydney Hodkinson gives information about the 1960s new music scene in Ann Arbor (the ONCE Group, The Grate Society) composition study with Ross Lee Finney.

Pedro António Avondano: Il Mondo Della Luna. Naxos 660487-88, 2021., Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The world-premiere recording of Il mondo della luna by Pedro António Avondano consists of a highly skillful and alert performance by Portuguese musicians, including singers well trained in Italian. The recitatives were rehearsed in an unusual way, with the singers first speaking the lines rather than singing them. The experiment will be judged variously by different observers. The reviewer dislikes the frequent clash in pitch between voice and instruments, especially at cadences. But others have hailed the recording unstintingly.

Svatopluk Havelka: Symphony No. 1 [In B-Flat Minor]. Supraphon Sua 18138 (Lp, 196?)., Stephen Thomson Moore, Tom Moore

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.